ENSURE: How to Ensure Safe Carbon Capture and Storage
NORSAR will lead a newly funded research project on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). Together with partners, the project has been allocated funds from the Norwegian Research Council and will take us one step closer to safe storage of CO2.
The project, ENSURE – effective monitoring of long-term site stability for transparent carbon capture and storage hazard assessment –, receives funds from the European Union’s ERA NET Cofund program called ACT, which is a subsidiary of Horizon 2020, a European research and innovation program. ACT, short for Accelerating CCS Technologies, is an international venture to support research, development and innovation in CO2-management. The venture comprises 16 countries and regions and is coordinated by the Norwegian Research Council.
ENSURE started in October 2021 and has a timeline of three years. The superior objective of ENSURE is to establish that microseismic monitoring technologies are not solely resilient and cost-effective, but a publicly accepted utility for verifying the integrity of CO2-storage sites. To establish this, NORSAR has eight partners from seven countries, among them are industrial actors such as Shell, Total, BP and ASN. The header image illustrates NORSAR’s partners, spread across Europe and North America.
– Safe storage of CO2 is crucial to succeeding with large-scale carbon capture and storage. Our objective with this project is to find the most applicable and cost-efficient method to ensure this. We now record and collect real field data at industrial-scale CO2 storage sites, testing a variety of new, innovative concepts to ensure that the most relevant data is used to conduct CO2 storage monitoring. I have great faith in it succeeding, says Volker Oye, Head of Research and seismologist at NORSAR.
A complex research venture
ENSURE will be led by NORSAR’s Bettina Goertz-Allmann and it includes three Work Packages. The first Work Package will identify factors that allow us to take decisions on the monitoring results and to which level of confidence the monitoring can be applied. This directly results in recommendations for most cost-effective monitoring networks. The second Work Package is about analyzing the integrity and stability of the storage sites and researchers will compare data and interpreted results from these sites, respectively. The third and last Work Package is about mapping stakeholders’ opinions on CO2 storage, in addition to dissemination of research results.
– It has been a rigorous application process where we have set up a solid research framework with great partners. I am looking forward to finally starting the project, says Bettina-Goertz-Allmann, Project Manager of ENSURE and seismologist at NORSAR.